IBM and Oracle; What Does It Mean For The Future of Java?

What does the recent announcement that IBM and Oracle are
joining forces over OpenJDK, mean for the future of Java?

In Mike Milinkovich’s opinion, it indicates that
Java’s future may not be as fractured as first thought. The idea of
the platform fragmenting, is a popular one in the blogosphere. At
the beginning of October, 2010, James Govrnor painted a complex picture of the Java ecoysystem, which
saw OSGi, Java, NoSQL, Eclipse, Jigsaw and GWT portrayed as
competing technologies. He also predicted that a frustrated IBM
might leverage the situation to their advantage “if IBM’s can’t
influence the JCP as much as it would like it can now play divide
and rule. I expect to see IBM giving Eclipse and OSGi a concerted
push over the next couple of years.” Now Oracle and IBM have come
together on the common ground of OpenJDK, it seems the situation
has been diffused, and the head-on collision between IBM and Oracle
avoided. Mike Milinkovich is hopeful that this move may signal even
more collaboration between IBM and Oracle, with them joining forces
within the JCP to drive through specficiaitons.

Can we expect similar business partnerships in the future? Mike
Milinkovich belives so, as he draws attention to the contrasting
personalities of Oracle and Sun. “Oracle is large enough and
confident enough in its execution that it is much more comfortable
in striking business deals with its co-opetition such as IBM. It
will be darn interesting to see if they are successful in signing
up more participants down the road,” he concludes. We might be in
for a long wait for a Google/Oracle collaboration, though….

Meanwhile, Sacha Labourey focuses on what this move could mean for the JSPA. The
JSPA states that compaines leading a JSR must provide a license to
whoever requests it. However, Sun refused to grant this license,
and now Oracle have adopted Sun’s interpretation of the JSPA. “How
can the Java community trust a leader which doesn’t stand by its
own constitution?” Sacha asks. He sees this development as an
acknolwedgment that a JSR lead can refuse to grant a license on
that JSR to a competitor, and get away with it, which is bad news
for the Java community.